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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

One of the largest Hubble Space Telescope images ever made of a complete
galaxy is being unveiled today at the American Astronomical Society
meeting in San Diego, Calif.

The Hubble telescope captured a display of starlight, glowing gas, and
silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust in this 4-foot-by-8-foot
image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. NGC 1300 is considered to be
prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from
normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all
the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight
bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center.

At Hubble's resolution, a myriad of fine details, some of which have
never before been seen, is seen throughout the galaxy's arms, disk,
bulge, and nucleus. Blue and red supergiant stars, star clusters, and
star-forming regions are well resolved across the spiral arms, and dust
lanes trace out fine structures in the disk and bar. Numerous more
distant galaxies are visible in the background, and are seen even
through the densest regions of NGC 1300.

In the core of the larger spiral structure of NGC 1300, the nucleus
shows its own extraordinary and distinct "grand-design" spiral structure
that is about 3,300 light-years (1 kiloparsec) long. Only galaxies with
large-scale bars appear to have these grand-design inner disks  a
spiral within a spiral. Models suggest that the gas in a bar can be
funneled inwards, and then spiral into the center through the
grand-design disk, where it can potentially fuel a central black hole.
NGC 1300 is not known to have an active nucleus, however, indicating
either that there is no black hole, or that it is not accreting matter.

The image was constructed from exposures taken in September 2004 by the
Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard Hubble in four filters. Starlight
and dust are seen in blue, visible, and infrared light. Bright star
clusters are highlighted in red by their associated emission from
glowing hydrogen gas. Due to the galaxy's large size, two adjacent
pointings of the telescope were necessary to cover the extent of the
spiral arms. The galaxy lies roughly 69 million light-years away (21
megaparsecs) in the direction of the constellation Eridanus.